Many of his points are just embarrassing. I don't get it, what pride can you take in showing that you tried a hobbyist operating system that flies in the hands of a master and then demonstrating all the areas you failed to comprehend/jury rig ?
If you want to write some impressive hack or piece of software, there's a never-ending frontier available to you, regardless of your starting point. Being able to fix a problem in Linux on your own machine is great - but, really, once that problem is solved, why should it ever have to be solved by anyone again? Isn't that the whole point of open source software?
Linux itself isn't the frontier it once was. It's been around for over 15 years - it's not perfect, but it's mature. But as TFA says, the overall system still suffers from all these architectural issues. Some of these (like audio mixing) are very basic features that have been missing (or at least inconsistently handled or badly supported) from the system forever, and for no good reason.
The size of the keyboard is fine for me (I have long, spindly fingers) - the only problem I have currently is some minor issues with keystroke reliability - occasionally keystrokes don't register and occasionally I get some kind of multiple input from switch bounce or something...
Still, got no regrets about buying this particular netbook.
Proof? Sure lots of netbooks are Windows, but that doesn't mean sales of Linux models aren't increasing with the market segment.
Can't offer proof or even statistics - but I think the Linux netbook thing is basically over. For a while, going with Linux instead of Windows made a significant difference in the price of the machine - and Linux could do the "netbook" job (i.e. run a web browser, etc.) just fine.
But since people wanted Windows on these machines (particularly as their storage specs improved), Microsoft made licensing Windows for these low-end machines more reasonable... With some conditions, I think. (Among other things, everyone's wording of "____ recommends Microsoft Windows for everyday computing" seems rather consistent) It's more or less killed the incentive to make Linux netbooks, as the majority of users (whether or not you or I would feel the same) would rather have Windows on the machine.
Personally, I have Debian on my 901 and it's bliss. Not so much as a Windows logo on the keyboard, and the software works the way I expect.
Feel free to provide more detail. Bear in mind there are people here who may not know all the details about.NET - and may not love it, either - but who would still be interested in learning more about it.
I agree with what you say. However, I think the big problem is going to be that Axum seems to be just another layer on top of.NET - and how much of that has been written for parallel processing? I'm guessing not a great deal, or even very carefully.
I couldn't really say... Though I expect that it's entirely possible to write a module in.NET that would be thread-safe over multiple invocations, just as it'd be possible to do the same in C.
The nice thing about Axum's relationship with.NET is that it (presumably) makes it rather easy to write your working code in a language you're comfortable with, and then write the parallelization logic in Axum. This, to me, is pretty important. If languages are specialized to different kinds of tasks, then you also want to choose the right language for a given job - and one language may not be the correct choice for an entire project. There is certainly code you wouldn't want to write using actors and a message passing interface, for instance. To me, that model of concurrent programming is better used at a higher level of the program. By taking advantage of.NET to link Axum to other.NET languages they give you the ability to use different languages for their strengths - optimize your "unit" code using a language like C# and then run it in parallel with Axum.
There are things I don't like about.NET and as a rule I'm not too comfortable with the idea of Mono becoming a core component of my Linux systems - but this is one piece of functionality that.NET provides - the provision of a common VM for use by scripting languages and compiled languages, the ability to freely link code between different languages built on that VM - that does make me rather jealous.
I see Microsoft is doing its best to help developers all over the world create race conditions. I wonder how many programmers there are who never really 'got' concurrency. Hopefully I'm not one of them. (And no, there is no programming language that can prevent you from screwing it up.)
Concurrent programming is becoming increasingly important for any kind of high-performance project. This doesn't necessarily mean one needs a "concurrent programming language" to do it - but whatever the chosen mechanism, the goal is the same - write a program that uses all cores effectively. One way or another, professional programmers are going to need to 'get' concurrency in the coming years.
The benefit of a language that provides parallelization as a basic assumption is that the language itself can provide infrastructure (for message-passing, task-scheduling, and so on) useful to the task. Such a language encourages programmers to think about problems in terms of how they can be parallelized, but leaves the compiler or the runtime engine free to make decisions about how the parallelization is to occur.
Another benefit of such a language is that a language that takes certain ideas as base assumptions can help guide the programmer's approach to a solution. This can involve a significant learning curve for the programmer (see, for instance, Prolog or various functional languages...) but it can help programmers to achieve a new way of solving their problems: in this case, one that is rather well suited to the current needs of high-performance CPUs.
The challenge with synchronization in Axum, presumably, is that it's possible to write code that will run in the engine that won't conform to the rules for an "actor" - that it will perform some non-thread-safe access to a file, or that it will otherwise do something that won't be safe when run in parallel. From that perspective it's no different from (almost) any other language - as you say, it's still possible to screw up. What it does provide, however, are guidelines and framework to help keep you from screwing up.
Well, we are talking about a fairly specialized operation, here - looking for specific CPU feature flags - it's not something that would commonly need to be done. But for people who need that kind of in-depth information about the system they're running on, it's right there waiting to be extracted.
I'd be curious about what the procedure would be on Windows... I wasn't able to find the information via a quick search of the "System" area of the control panel - but then I'm no Windows expert...
If they think goats are cuter than lawn mowers, then I think they're hiring the wrong people to mow their lawn...
They should have just put ads out: "Wanted: cute people to mow lawns." They could arrange to get some kids dressed up like they're out of a Rockwell painting, or some tasty co-ed types... I know these aren't the usual things one looks for in a lawn mower, but if you're taking goats as the aesthetically pleasing alternative then I have to think you can do better.
Are people willing to freely pay that nickel? Do they choose to pay that nickel of their own free will?
Yes.
So why the snark?
Well, with Verizon, for instance, you don't have the option of turning SMS off, and you do pay for incoming messages. So people are free to send you all the text they like, and you wind up paying for it. That's my main complaint.
- SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings
- SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead
I'm sorry, I've got to stop right there.
I have had SMS messages take hours to get to me. Usually when this has happened I've just called the person I was waiting to hear from, spoken to them directly - so clearly the phone network knew where my phone was.
SMS is a nice utilization of technology, but it's become grossly overpriced.
It was explained away in the last season of Enterprise. A rouge human researcher in genetic engineering had made some superhumans, and Klingons wanted the tech, too. So they copied/stole the research and ended up implanting themselves with human DNA. The changes went viral, and soon affected the entire Klingon race. They presumably found a fix some time in between TOS and the first movie.
That's a time period of, what, 3.5 years? (two more years of "five year mission" followed by 18 month refit...)
Sure, that's plenty of time to cure a genetic flaw that's afflicted the entire Klingon race, and fix the aesthetic consequences of the change...
I'll just stick with the "better makeup" explanation.:)
Not sure exactly what's doing it, but in my Ubuntu and gNewSense installs:
If I insert a CD with autorun files on it or it has an autorun folder, I am prompted that this disc has software on it designed to run automatically, and I am asked what I would like to do about it.
Seemed to be pretty sensible really. I mean *I* inserted the CD, so I expect something to happen.
This kind of thing always drove me crazy, and still does. Like sometimes I'll take a CD out of the drive to put another one in - and then when I'm done with the second one I'll put the first one back in 'cause I don't know where the case is. The fact that I put that first CD back in the drive doesn't mean I want to run it...
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Many of his points are just embarrassing. I don't get it, what pride can you take in showing that you tried a hobbyist operating system that flies in the hands of a master and then demonstrating all the areas you failed to comprehend/jury rig ?
If you want to write some impressive hack or piece of software, there's a never-ending frontier available to you, regardless of your starting point. Being able to fix a problem in Linux on your own machine is great - but, really, once that problem is solved, why should it ever have to be solved by anyone again? Isn't that the whole point of open source software?
Linux itself isn't the frontier it once was. It's been around for over 15 years - it's not perfect, but it's mature. But as TFA says, the overall system still suffers from all these architectural issues. Some of these (like audio mixing) are very basic features that have been missing (or at least inconsistently handled or badly supported) from the system forever, and for no good reason.
Give me a break, in New Hampshire we have to climb 1,200 feet to get to the foot of the mountain.
Well, if you think that's impressive wait till you hear this:
My car climbed Mount Washington.
How about them apples?
Goombah is an Italian term for a very trusted friend. If you interpret it otherwise, that's a result of the bastardization of its true meaning.
Likewise, there is no reason a young fellow should object to being called boy... :D
If you were hanging around with some Kuribo and started calling them "Goombah" they'd take that shoe of theirs and put it so far up your ass...
How did you get used to the tiny keyboard?
The size of the keyboard is fine for me (I have long, spindly fingers) - the only problem I have currently is some minor issues with keystroke reliability - occasionally keystrokes don't register and occasionally I get some kind of multiple input from switch bounce or something...
Still, got no regrets about buying this particular netbook.
Yeah sure...
>> Sales of Linux netbooks collapsed.
Proof? Sure lots of netbooks are Windows, but that doesn't mean sales of Linux models aren't increasing with the market segment.
Can't offer proof or even statistics - but I think the Linux netbook thing is basically over. For a while, going with Linux instead of Windows made a significant difference in the price of the machine - and Linux could do the "netbook" job (i.e. run a web browser, etc.) just fine.
But since people wanted Windows on these machines (particularly as their storage specs improved), Microsoft made licensing Windows for these low-end machines more reasonable... With some conditions, I think. (Among other things, everyone's wording of "____ recommends Microsoft Windows for everyday computing" seems rather consistent) It's more or less killed the incentive to make Linux netbooks, as the majority of users (whether or not you or I would feel the same) would rather have Windows on the machine.
Personally, I have Debian on my 901 and it's bliss. Not so much as a Windows logo on the keyboard, and the software works the way I expect.
Your understanding is...flawed to put it nicely.
Feel free to provide more detail. Bear in mind there are people here who may not know all the details about .NET - and may not love it, either - but who would still be interested in learning more about it.
detracts from the gravity of the situation.
Death to Mario games that glorify the squashing of poor little Goombas! Goomba rights now!
The Kuribo do not respond to their communal slave name "Goombah".
Interesting points. Thank you for enlightening me. :)
I agree with what you say. However, I think the big problem is going to be that Axum seems to be just another layer on top of .NET - and how much of that has been written for parallel processing? I'm guessing not a great deal, or even very carefully.
I couldn't really say... Though I expect that it's entirely possible to write a module in .NET that would be thread-safe over multiple invocations, just as it'd be possible to do the same in C.
The nice thing about Axum's relationship with .NET is that it (presumably) makes it rather easy to write your working code in a language you're comfortable with, and then write the parallelization logic in Axum. This, to me, is pretty important. If languages are specialized to different kinds of tasks, then you also want to choose the right language for a given job - and one language may not be the correct choice for an entire project. There is certainly code you wouldn't want to write using actors and a message passing interface, for instance. To me, that model of concurrent programming is better used at a higher level of the program. By taking advantage of .NET to link Axum to other .NET languages they give you the ability to use different languages for their strengths - optimize your "unit" code using a language like C# and then run it in parallel with Axum.
There are things I don't like about .NET and as a rule I'm not too comfortable with the idea of Mono becoming a core component of my Linux systems - but this is one piece of functionality that .NET provides - the provision of a common VM for use by scripting languages and compiled languages, the ability to freely link code between different languages built on that VM - that does make me rather jealous.
"We've been looking into the battery options for netbooks as well - we think three cells ought to be enough for anybody."*
*(not an actual quote)
I see Microsoft is doing its best to help developers all over the world create race conditions. I wonder how many programmers there are who never really 'got' concurrency. Hopefully I'm not one of them. (And no, there is no programming language that can prevent you from screwing it up.)
Concurrent programming is becoming increasingly important for any kind of high-performance project. This doesn't necessarily mean one needs a "concurrent programming language" to do it - but whatever the chosen mechanism, the goal is the same - write a program that uses all cores effectively. One way or another, professional programmers are going to need to 'get' concurrency in the coming years.
The benefit of a language that provides parallelization as a basic assumption is that the language itself can provide infrastructure (for message-passing, task-scheduling, and so on) useful to the task. Such a language encourages programmers to think about problems in terms of how they can be parallelized, but leaves the compiler or the runtime engine free to make decisions about how the parallelization is to occur.
Another benefit of such a language is that a language that takes certain ideas as base assumptions can help guide the programmer's approach to a solution. This can involve a significant learning curve for the programmer (see, for instance, Prolog or various functional languages...) but it can help programmers to achieve a new way of solving their problems: in this case, one that is rather well suited to the current needs of high-performance CPUs.
The challenge with synchronization in Axum, presumably, is that it's possible to write code that will run in the engine that won't conform to the rules for an "actor" - that it will perform some non-thread-safe access to a file, or that it will otherwise do something that won't be safe when run in parallel. From that perspective it's no different from (almost) any other language - as you say, it's still possible to screw up. What it does provide, however, are guidelines and framework to help keep you from screwing up.
Who says Linux is difficult to use?
I guess this is sarcasm?
Well, we are talking about a fairly specialized operation, here - looking for specific CPU feature flags - it's not something that would commonly need to be done. But for people who need that kind of in-depth information about the system they're running on, it's right there waiting to be extracted.
I'd be curious about what the procedure would be on Windows... I wasn't able to find the information via a quick search of the "System" area of the control panel - but then I'm no Windows expert...
You can call Verizon and ask them to block SMS on your phone. My brother's done it.
Huh... Well, that's good to know. The people who sold me the service plan didn't seem to think it could be done. :)
If they think goats are cuter than lawn mowers, then I think they're hiring the wrong people to mow their lawn...
They should have just put ads out: "Wanted: cute people to mow lawns." They could arrange to get some kids dressed up like they're out of a Rockwell painting, or some tasty co-ed types... I know these aren't the usual things one looks for in a lawn mower, but if you're taking goats as the aesthetically pleasing alternative then I have to think you can do better.
Are people willing to freely pay that nickel? Do they choose to pay that nickel of their own free will?
Yes.
So why the snark?
Well, with Verizon, for instance, you don't have the option of turning SMS off, and you do pay for incoming messages. So people are free to send you all the text they like, and you wind up paying for it. That's my main complaint.
Differences:
- SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings
- SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead
I'm sorry, I've got to stop right there.
I have had SMS messages take hours to get to me. Usually when this has happened I've just called the person I was waiting to hear from, spoken to them directly - so clearly the phone network knew where my phone was.
SMS is a nice utilization of technology, but it's become grossly overpriced.
is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 0xF*10
fixed that for you
Are you joking?
"fixed that for you" seems to be one of those phrases now doomed to be used only when someone actually is joking...
The fact that you're using a CD drive as a jewel case pretty much invalidates any opinion you may have on this matter.
Now that's a load of crap. You don't have to agree with me, but saying my opinion isn't valid? Fuck you, man.
Everybody claimed that Spiderman 3 sucked.
Were they wrong?
Of course followed by...
"KHAAAAAAAAAAAAANN!"
Always gotta love that bit.
No, no, you've got it all wrong.
"Khan!" came after "I will leave you as you left me - as you left her, marooned on a dead world, buried alive" etc.
The "Klingon proverb" bit came earlier, I believe - I think it was bridge chatter on the Reliant.
It was explained away in the last season of Enterprise. A rouge human researcher in genetic engineering had made some superhumans, and Klingons wanted the tech, too. So they copied/stole the research and ended up implanting themselves with human DNA. The changes went viral, and soon affected the entire Klingon race. They presumably found a fix some time in between TOS and the first movie.
That's a time period of, what, 3.5 years? (two more years of "five year mission" followed by 18 month refit...)
Sure, that's plenty of time to cure a genetic flaw that's afflicted the entire Klingon race, and fix the aesthetic consequences of the change...
I'll just stick with the "better makeup" explanation. :)
Not sure exactly what's doing it, but in my Ubuntu and gNewSense installs:
If I insert a CD with autorun files on it or it has an autorun folder, I am prompted that this disc has software on it designed to run automatically, and I am asked what I would like to do about it.
Seemed to be pretty sensible really. I mean *I* inserted the CD, so I expect something to happen.
This kind of thing always drove me crazy, and still does. Like sometimes I'll take a CD out of the drive to put another one in - and then when I'm done with the second one I'll put the first one back in 'cause I don't know where the case is. The fact that I put that first CD back in the drive doesn't mean I want to run it...
No , you would either break your finger or the screen, and if you are a pervert - Accidentally a whole...
A whole what?
nine THOUSAAaaaaaaAND!!!
(Eight Thousand in the original Japanese...)
read the time stamps.
I did. It was a full minute after the first post... :D